Shelley Treacher Underground Confidence Recovery
Shelley Treacher Stress & Anxiety Recovery
Grief Lives in the Body, Not Just the Mind
Grief Lives in the Body, Not Just the Mind
Grief Lives in the Body, Not Just the Mind
Friday 27th March 2026
Somatic psychotherapist Shelley Treacher explains how grief lives in the nervous system and how it fuels exhaustion, anxiety and compulsive habits.
7 minutes
Informative
Compassionate
Inspiring
Hopeful
Supportive
About this podcast
Author:
Shelley Treacher Underground Confidence Recovery
Overview:
Categories:
Recovery from Trauma
Sobriety Toolkit
Healing Relationships
Navigating Intimate Relationships
Understanding Addiction & Recovery
Links:
Visit site
Episodes:
116 (View all)
Do you want to link to this podcast?
Get the buttons here!Grief in the Body: Why You Feel Drained, Stuck and Reaching for Old Habits
Episode Overview
- Grief is not just emotional; it affects the whole nervous system, influencing heart rate, breathing, energy and motivation.
- The body can respond to grief with either a hyper-aroused, anxious state or a hypo-aroused, collapsed state that resembles depression.
- Grief arises from many kinds of loss, including relationships, missed childhood experiences and unrealised dreams, not only death.
- Habits like emotional eating, alcohol use, scrolling and chasing unavailable partners can be protective responses to unprocessed grief, not signs of weakness.
- Healing starts with gently acknowledging and feeling grief over time, allowing the nervous system to relax and protective behaviours to soften.
Grief isn’t a weakness or an inconvenience. It’s one of the ways that we experience love.
What drives someone to seek a life without numbing out with food, alcohol, or endless scrolling? This episode of Underground Confidence Recovery looks at a surprising root cause: unrecognised grief living in the body. Somatic psychotherapist Shelley Treacher talks about grief as a full-body experience rather than just sadness in the mind. She explains how “grief isn’t just emotional. It’s biological,” affecting heart rate, breathing, energy, and motivation.
You’ll hear her break down two common nervous system responses: the hyper-aroused state, where you feel wired, anxious and stressed, and the hypo-aroused, collapsed state, where everything feels heavy, slow and hopeless. Shelley also widens the idea of grief beyond bereavement. She names the losses that often go unnoticed: the relationship that ended, the childhood you never had, the version of life you hoped for but didn’t get, or dreams that never came to life.
Her approach is gentle: healing doesn’t start with forcing change, but with understanding what the body has been holding and letting grief move “gradually, slowly, gently, in manageable waves over time.” As grief is acknowledged, she explains, the nervous system eases, energy returns, and those protective habits can soften because “the body knows how to grieve, but it also knows how to heal.” If you’ve ever wondered why you feel exhausted, flat, or stuck in familiar habits, this episode offers a compassionate frame that might help everything make a bit more sense.
Even when these aren’t labelled as grief, the body reacts just as strongly. For anyone caught in compulsive eating, alcohol use, scrolling, overworking, or chasing unavailable partners, this conversation may feel uncomfortably accurate. Shelley suggests these patterns are “just a way to protect yourself from feelings that are difficult to manage,” rather than signs of weakness or failure. What might your body be grieving that your mind hasn’t quite named yet?